Recent News & Events
This has been a hectic week, with work, home life & income taxes due tomorrow night. I got mine done tonight, a whole day early - amazing isn't it.
I swear, if I took a tax class, I could probably do my taxes (I already do) and make it so the government has to me back every penny that they deducted from my paycheck. There are loopholes everywhere - deduct nearly every kind of interest that you paid on a qualified loan, deduct your property taxes, deduct your vehicle taxes, and you can even deduct state & local sales taxes (portions of it). These are the things I know I can deduct, but I'm sure there are 10 more deductions for each one of those I mentioned.
Comments about "racism" and the NBA wanting to set a minimum age (21) to enter the draft: I think Jermaine O'Neal's comments are not an accurate representation of what the league is trying to do.
#1 - The league is not racist. The last time I checked, over 85% of the league is made up of people of color, or of non-american ethnicities. What other market allows those kind of numbers?
#2 - David Stern wants to provide the best product possible - a high schooler who sits on the bench for 3 years before he gets to play (ie: Jermaine O'Neal, Tracy Mcgrady, Kobe Bryant, ) does nothing for the NBA. Imagine if O'Neal had gone to college for 1-2 of those years and then came into the NBA; he would've played in about 30 more games per year in the NCAA than he did in the NBA (virtually none) so he would've gained experience and would've excelled from the get-go.
#3 - There are obvious exceptions to the rules - Lebron James and Amare Stoudemire are the main 2 that come to mind.
#4 - Going pro is about one thing - $$$ money. A lot of the kids that want to go straight to the NBA are not equipped and or educated well enough to go to college. They could get a scholarship for their athletics, but they'd likely need a full-time tutor or they'd fail their courses.
Let's move on and quit talking about race...
posted by CoryH @ 9:14 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Did you actually READ the entirety of what Jermaine O'Neal said? He did not say he thought the League's intention to impose an age limit was racially motivated. What he said was that he believed if the age limit was imposed one of its effects would be an economic hardship that would fall almost entirely upon one ethnic group; african-americans.
Jermaine's comments were intelligent and rational. Everyone's reactions to them were not.
What if you ran a messenger business and you provided bicycles free of charge for your employees to use to do their work. Your employees that worked at night were mostly students who had their own bicycles and didn't use the ones you provided but the daytime employees were retired folks too poor to provide their own bicycles. Let's say 90% of the free bike use happened during the day and 10% at night. You decide that it's costing you too much to maintain the free bikes so you cut the number of bikes you provide by half. Who does this effect more; the dayshift retirees or the nightshift students? Stern is trying to impose an age limit because he wants to improve his business but, in the process, he's mostly depriving young African-Americans of economic opportunity. Will it still happen? Probably. Is it "racist"? Not in motivation, but certainly in effect.
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